“... Smith in the current issue of Baetyl. (This new journal coincidentally takes its name from the black stone into which the goddess Cybele metamorphosed in order to escape Zeus on one of his rampages – more flesh and stone in opposition.) Sennett follows the approach of Marcel Detienne in his brilliant The Gardens of Adonis and interprets these rituals as ...”

“... we find one of Bellini’s greatest paintings, his late altarpiece of Saint Jerome between Saints Christopher and Louis of Toulouse, which is reproduced on the jacket of The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice. The book opens with a consideration of which elements in this painting were conditioned by its setting. The church interior is illustrated in ...”

“... that the bread was better in France?My students wore colourful tracksuits and Air Force Ones, or black shiny jeans, white sneakers and big sweatshirts. A lone goth called Agathe (whose name, like the others here, has been changed) told me she had difficulty with ‘empathy’ and always interpreted things literally. One 15-year-old asked me whether people ...”

“... utilitarian applications of surveying, heraldry or craft. With (the introduction tells us) ‘a black lead pencil and paper’, the reader should ‘slightly sketch’ the image placed before them (vaulting horse, waterfall, clenched fist). ‘By rubbing gently out with stale Bread’ and then through a process of retouching and hatching and shading with ...”

“... 1591, in the preface to his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. It could also be comic, as Christopher Marlowe realised when writing his Hero and Leander two years later – a poem which, in describing the beauty of Leander’s body, pairs ‘tell ye’ with ‘belly’.According to Scott-Baumann, the proliferation of feminine rhyme in the work of ...”

“... and the last: ‘Suddenly, from nowhere, she heard a clatter of hooves on the road. “A black horse without saddle or bridle cantered along the road … The horse was part Arab and beautiful, but in this context, suddenly unpredictable and dangerous.”’ In between there are hints of symbolic subplots, paths not taken, connections waiting to be ...”

“... On 18 May 1593 a warrant was issued to ‘apprehend’ Christopher Marlowe, and on 20 May he was brought before the Privy Council for questioning. He was not detained, but was ordered to report to the Council daily until ‘licensed to the contrary’. This state of precarious liberty lasted only until 30 May, when he was fatally stabbed by a man named Ingram Frizer, though whether his sudden death was a matter of coincidence or conspiracy remains unresolved ...”

“... Weekend World was creating its own network of clever, ambitious men. Peter Jay, Peter Mandelson, Christopher Hitchens, Brian Walden and their slightly geeky colleagues turned out to be a more influential and politically adept group than Panorama’s fist-fighting war reporters. And none was more geeky and influential than Weekend World’s creator and ...”

“... At the centre of Michael Cunningham’s new novel, in the second of its three tales, Cat, a black woman police investigator in New York, has the job of receiving and recording the calls of people threatening to blow themselves and others to pieces. Only because these deranged stories have become too familiar does she miss the one who really means it, a young boy, who, without forewarning or apparent motive, goes up to a stranger in Central Park, embraces him and explodes ...”

“... succès d’estime the Smart Set with ‘louse magazines’ such as Parisienne, Saucy Stories and Black Mask. Die neue linie, featuring work by Bauhaus designers such as László Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and Irmgard Sörensen-Popitz, was a revamp of the mass market German women’s magazine Frauen-Mode and a probable influence on Vanity Fair’s designer ...”

“... of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries. In the 15th century, after the Black Death, the region’s population was at a historic low. Land was left fallow, and villagers complained about the encroachment of wild animals and forests on crops and pasture. Nature was taking its revenge for the great land colonisation movement of the ...”

“... for each of them. ‘And it is lost, lost, lost, lost!’She had another heart now, which beat a black shadow of her real one. But if it ceased to beat she would die too, like that security robot who recently committed suicide in a fountain, face down and almost funny.In Toronto, a man she talked to often in the portal began to speak out of his actual ...”

“... locations and special FX. A wicked usurper sends his nephew to Colchis on the far side of the Black Sea, a mysterious kingdom in the former Soviet Union famous for its pheasants and autumn crocus. His mission impossible is to steal a golden fleece from under the watchful gaze of a giant snake. He gathers together a band of useful heroes to help him and ...”

“... that immigration from Britain’s former colonies would lead to a dire situation in which ‘the black man will have the whip hand over the white man’; ten years later, the prime minister-in-waiting Margaret Thatcher claimed in a television interview that British people were ‘really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a ...”

“... Baby and the Savoy Brown Blues Band. ‘Martin Stone hadn’t been to bed for three years. His black beret was twitching on his scalp.’ Behind Kingsley Amis and ‘ice-cream suited’ J.G. Ballard are Alan Brien, Maeve Peake, Dave Britton and legions of the erased and discontinued: Notting Hill colons, grafters, bullshitters, pharmaceutical casualties ...”